Heike Becker writes about what has been going on in Germany since 7 October last year. She contextualises the German government’s unconditional support of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and astonishing efforts by government and civil society associations to silence critics of Israel’s actions. Becker points out the deafening silence in mainstream German politics and society about the thousands of children, women, and men who have been killed.
By Heike Becker
When I started expanding my long-time research on memory, colonialism and activism in Namibia and South Africa with a new project to investigate the role of memory activism within current decolonisation movements in Germany, among the first books I read was Susan Neiman’s then just-published Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019). Neiman, a Jewish-American, Berlin-based philosopher argued, in a nutshell, that German society had largely accepted responsibility for and learned from actions done by the country in the past (whereas Americans had not done so regarding their history of Jim Crow – thus the provocative title). Neiman reasoned that while particularly the former West Germany had resisted taking responsibility for the Holocaust of the European Jews, after German reunification in 1990 the country had developed an exemplary example of how to atone for an evil past.
Neiman’s book made a lot of sense to me then although I was dismayed by the fact that she makes very little mention of how Germany had atoned, or rather had failed to do so, for its colonial past, and especially the German empire’s genocide of the Herero and Nama in what was then German South West Africa, today’s Namibia. As I learnt during my initial field work in Berlin, and following the public, media and political, debates on postcolonialism and antisemitism that flared up time and again in 2020 and 2021, mainstream Germany’s stance was at best ambiguous.
For sure, in contrast to decades of colonial amnesia, the country’s colonial past became a topic of public discourse from the later 2010s onwards, with a focus on museums, human remains, restoration and reparation. Some civil society initiatives received substantial state funding for projects to decolonise the public space. In 2021 the German government concluded what has been termed the ‘reconciliation agreement’ with Namibia, still controversial and contested, but one could argue that, slowly and awkwardly, some progress had been made.
Yet, postcolonial and decolonial activists, artists and scholars also felt an ever-tightening space. The antisemitism allegations against Achille Mbembe in the northern spring of 2020, and the media uproar that followed the publication of the German edition of Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization in early 2021 were just the tip of the iceberg. In 2022, Germany’s high-profile contemporary art exhibition DOCUMENTA came under attack for alleged antisemitism, when the event, which takes place every five years in Kassel, was curated by the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa.
It appears at times that Germany has been trying hard to focus on its own sensibilities and to close off from the challenges of decolonisation and the postcolonial world. A flurry of antisemitism accusations hit particularly those of Arab and Muslim backgrounds, Black and Afro-diasporic people, and also anti-Zionist left-wing Jews. In fact, everyone who dared calling for an expansion of the country’s ‘memory culture’, so celebrated in Neiman’s book, could quickly end up being suspected of ‘relativising’ the Holocaust. In 2021 the Australian historian Dirk Moses provoked a heated debate about what he described as the “new German catechism”, that is, the German government’s and the country’s leading media houses’ insistence that comparing the memory of the Holocaust with other genocides was more than just probing the moral foundation of post-1945 Germany; it was “an apostasy from the right faith”.
Although not unprecedented thus, what has been going on in Germany since 7 October 2023 has been quite incredible. The German government’s 12 January 2024 stringent declaration, even before any words had been heard from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, that it would join the ICJ main hearing as a third party in support of Israel may be unparalleled, even among Western governments, but it is not at all surprising considering the country’s general atmosphere since 7 October.
Susan Neiman was among the first who raised concern, in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) on 19 October 2023, about what she termed “philosemitic McCarthyism”, and on 3 November, writing again in the NYRB, she pointed out that, “in recent weeks, Germany’s reflexive defences of Israel and suppression of its critics have assumed a fevered pitch.”
In the first week of February 2024, the much-admired Lebanese-Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage was sacked from his position as a visiting senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. The unilateral severance of Hage’s association with the Institute resulted from an article, published a few days earlier in a right-wing German newspaper, in which Hage was accused of antisemitism due to his alleged “fiery BDS [the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement] activism.”
The DIE WELT journalists referenced a selected few of his recent social media comments on the current Gaza war. Hage, who is globally renowned for his profound and insightful scholarship on ethnonationalism, immigration and race in Australia, as well as his Middle-Eastern anthropology, responded with a statement, in which he clarified his position. He pointed out his consistent analysis, as expressed in both his academic writings and his social media posts: “I have a political ideal of a multi-religious society made from Christians, Muslims and Jews living together on that land. … I have criticised both Israelis and Palestinians who work against such a goal. If Israel has copped and continues to cop the biggest criticism it is because its colonial ethno-nationalist project is by far the biggest obstacle towards achieving such aim.” Hage’s contemplations on framing the 2023 Gaza war were pertinent in a thoughtful and moving article, published on the ALLEGRA LAB blog-website in November 2023.
This has been the first prominent case of supposedly philosemitic McCarthyism in the academic realm, although there have certainly been threats in German, Austrian and Swiss academic institutions for some time. Mostly, censoring has targeted artists and the cultural sector, exhibitions and symposia long in the planning have been cancelled, prize awards have been withdrawn or award ceremonies awkwardly re-drawn, a major cultural institution in Berlin had its core funding cancelled, the list goes on and on. Introduced on 5 January, the conservative regional council of Berlin announced that it would introduce a new measure. Supposedly intended to combat antisemitism, state funding would in future be awarded only to applicants who commit in writing to a controversial antisemitism clause, based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which proscribes criticism of Israel as “antisemitic”. Critics made clear that this clause was going to silence any critics of the state and politics of Israel and undermine freedom of expression.
After more than 6,000 signatories of an open letter protested against this clause, and boycott actions proposed and supported by numerous international artists, the Berlin senate Department of Culture backed down and withdrew the clause. The successful collective actions are, some hope, a few cracks in the wall of Germany’s deafening silence regarding the violence and deaths in Gaza. There have been also some brave statements in defence of freedom of cultural expression and research, including a statement made by the German association of social and cultural anthropologists on 12 February, which expressed concern over the attacks on renown intellectuals and warned against “our public sphere [being] shaped by reductionist judgements of socially complex conflict dynamics and indiscriminate accusations of antisemitism.”
Yet, listening to German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s new year’s address, the deafening silence, which has been pertinent in German public discourse, came to me as a terrible – and lasting – shock that the head of the German government had not even one word of compassion to spare about the dying, freezing, starving people of Gaza after having expressed his government’s profound grief about Hamas’s attack on Israel. But then total silence followed: Not a word about the thousands of children, women, and men who have been killed by Israel’s air strikes and ground war. Not one word. None. Complete deafening silence.
This made it abundantly clear that in the dominant German discourse “Never Again” does not mean “never again for anyone”. Instead, the German government’s unconditional support of Israel’s conduct in Gaza comes across as just a logical conclusion of what Susan Neiman termed in one of her recent articles “historical reckoning haywire.”
Considering the unspeakable devastation in Gaza, it seems self-indulgent to speak about the personal and affective, but here I go: I have been tearing up a lot lately. I came of age in 1970s West Germany and was part of a 1980s generation of young activists who set out to break the walls of silence about the genocides of the Jews, the Sinti and Roma, and other ‘undesirables’ that continued to prevail in West Germany, as it was then. I defiantly wore my Palestinian keffiyeh on marches against antisemitism and racism in Germany, as well as on rallies against apartheid in South Africa and Namibia. Despite all the contradictions of the past few years, I was getting cautiously hopeful, never did I think I was once more going to be so deeply ashamed of being German.
Heike Becker focuses on the politics of memory, popular culture, activism, and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). She also works on decolonize memory activism and anti-racist politics in Germany and the UK. Heike has been a major contributor to roape.net since 2014.
Featured Photograph: Pro-Palestinian demonstration in Germany on 10 February; such protests are incredibly tough for activists, artists and intellectuals to attend, organise and support (Credit: Heike Becker).
References
Hage, Ghassan. 2023. ‘Gaza and the Coming Age of the “Warrior”’. Allegra Lab: Anthropology for Radical Optimism. 16 November 2023.
Moses, A. Dirk. 2021. ‘The German Catechism’. Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 May 2021.
Neiman, Susan. 2023. ‘Germany On Edge’. New York Review of Books, November 3, 2023 issue.
Neiman, Susan. 2023. ‘Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire’. New York Review of Books, October 19, 2023 issue.
Neiman, Susan. 2019. Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. London: Allen Lane.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (German: 2021. Multidirektionale Erinnerung: Holocaustgedenken im Zeitalter der Dekolonisierung. Berlin: Metropol Verlag)
